Violet Rollergirl’s tips for convincing clients to use crypto
While cryptocurrency offers real benefits even if your clients never adopt it themselves, the real power is in getting our clients and customers to pay us with it. This article helps you get them on board.
In this article
- Let clients know crypto is an option!
- Recognize the uphill battle
- Become an expert, yourself
- Use psychological priming: preempt concerns, casually
- Accurately reframe the comparison against crypto
- Minimize the pain
- Refocus on and maximize the benefits
- Make it worth his while
- Closing thoughts
Let clients know crypto is an option!
There’s no question I’ve had more luck getting clients to pay me in cryptocurrency because of how much I talk about it. This is in some ways a self-selection bias: you attract what you project!
So, my first piece of advice is simply advertise that you accept crypto! More clients will outright offer to pay you this way if they already know you accept it.
Read my complementary guide written for clients explaining how to find companions and creators who accept cryptocurrency, and make sure you show up on those lists.
That said, passively hoping that this will happen for you is not a strategy. There is more you can and may need to do, especially when it comes to convincing the skeptical or reluctant clients.
Recognize the uphill battle
Convincing clients to do anything they’re not already familiar with will always be an uphill battle.
When that thing is paying you differently than they’re used to, it’s an even steeper hill. And that’s to say nothing of when that unfamiliar thing is using a whole different currency, especially when he has one hand on his phone and the other, um…not on his phone.
You are swimming upstream in the same way and for the same reason that it’s not a winnable battle to get all clients to stop writing stupid, dangerous things that threaten your financial existence in the memos of CashApp or PayPal sends.
The actual solution isn’t one in your power alone; it is a systemic, collective, and wholesale move away from permissioned money. That’s just not going to happen anytime soon.
So, what do we do in the mean time?
Become an expert, yourself
Become as familiar as you can with the method that you ask him to send from.
The more confident and prepared you sound, the less troubling, scary, and uncertain this will seem to your client. Practice with friends so you know every step and don’t even have to look at the screen to direct your client where to click or tap.
If we ever meet in person, I’ll walk you through this myself. (Check my travel calendar for opportunities to meet; I’m very frequently going to a lot of events to talk about this exact stuff.) You can also book me for a 1:1 or small group consultation.
Use psychological priming: preempt concerns, casually
Many objections to using crypto from clients who are otherwise at least willing to try it happen when they are surprised by something they don’t expect. Preempt as many of the common concerns as you can by casually mentioning them ahead of time so your client is already psychologically primed to expect it by the time you get there.
For example, since cryptocurrency exchanges and payment apps are actually legally regulated similarly to the way banks are, clients are going to have to submit ID verification to use them. Make sure this is something your client already knows before he tries to pay you in crypto.
I often use a script that sounds something like this: “As long as you’ve verified your CashApp account—y’know, just like you would have to do with any other bank, because that’s what CashApp is, it’s an institution holding your money, a bank—then I’ll show you how to use it more privately with me than you could with your bank.”
Then, be ready to explain how it is in fact more private. (In this case, that’s because when you create a swap deposit as a method of receiving payment, no one can see who he’s paying.)
Accurately reframe the comparison against crypto
People always compare options as they exist in the moment, and generally have very inaccurate memories about past experiences. Use this to your advantage by being ready to reframe current options with crypto in comparison with the equivalent in the fiat world.
One common example of this is when a client cannot make a payment immediately because they have not yet verified their identity with their crypto exchange or payment app, and so the experience feels “harder and more intrusive” than if they “just” used their credit card. But in reality, their credit card already knows who they are and they simply don’t remember this fact.
So when a custodial crypto exchange or payment app asks for legal details, it does not actually mean that the crypto option is less private than their credit card at all, it just feels like this right now.
What’s happening is that the client is comparing being ID-checked now to having been ID-checked when he first signed up for his credit card or bank account. He was asked the same questions then, but since those questions are only being asked for the crypto pathway in this moment, that’s the one that feels “worse.”
Objections to crypto sends for this reason are entirely unfair on their face by sheer fact, but fact is not going to change his mind. How you make him feel about the facts will.
Minimize the pain
This one’s easy: just remind clients that the pain is temporary, and minimal. For example: “you just need to set this up one time.”
Refocus on and maximize the benefits
The corrollary to minimizing a client’s pain with crypto is to maximize the benefits of it. One phrase I use a lot is: “you’ll never have to figure out payment methods with any provider who takes crypto; I’m not just showing you this for me, I’m showing you how to always and forever pay any escort privately even if she doesn’t have the same app as you do.”
Make it worth his while
Literally show him the difference in fee structure when he’s paying via crypto versus Throne or whatever other option is available, with its extra fees. Show your client that they’re saving money (because they are), and ask them to consider if that effective discount is worth the price of the one-time delay or friction in readying their custodial crypto accounts to pay you.
Closing thoughts
These are all just sales and, yes, some social engineering techniques.
If you have resistant clients, you can also just wait it out.
Eventually, everyone using fiat financial services like CashApp or whatever is going to have to verify themselves, providers and clients alike. Most of the services you use have already announced their intent to do this in order to comply with increasingly draconian government surveillance and regulatory rules. But before long, all electronic fiat financial systems will use cryptocurrency or blockchain technology in some form or fashion under the hood; CashApp’s instant fiat USD to USDC crypto conversion is just the first domino.
Before you know it, your bank will offer crypto options, Zelle will be a crypto option, your credit card will be linkable to a crypto wallet. But none of those will feel any different because they are all custodial, permissioned, gatekept bank account equivalents and so we—providers—will still need to know how to walk clients through sending to self-custodial wallets where we control our own money.
In this imminent future, most clients will have already been ID-verified and won’t remember having been so, just like their bank accounts are now.
This technology will continue to evolve in such a way that it will get easier and easier for clients to not know they are using crypto while they are using crypto. The only question is whether we can retain access to the tools (like permissionless, decentralized exchanges and self-custodial wallets supporting encrypted, private money) that let us interface with our clients’ accounts without needing to have open accounts at the same institutions they do.
And the more of us doing this today, the more likely it is that more of us will be able to do it tomorrow.
